Latest Features

Y2K bugs notwithstanding, 1999 was a payoff year for patient music fans. Several artists made comebacks -- perhaps fearful they only had a few months before computer systems would revert back to the year 1900, and CD players would explode.

Few musical marriages have been so magical, so intuitively right, as that of the great blues singer Howlin’ Wolf and his guitarist, Hubert Sumlin. From the time he joined the blues legend’s band in 1954 until Wolf’s death in 1976, Sumlin played a central role in crafting some of the century’s most memorable and influential American roots music. His economical, stinging fills, unusual rhythmic approach and perfectly placed bent notes are as integral as Wolf’s growl to the blues power of classics like “Spoonful,” “Smokestack Lightnin’,” “Killing Floor” and “The Red Rooster.”

Leave it to the ladies to handle the bass with flair. Check out these eight pros who have stepped up to hold it down. From jazz to metalcore, and just about everything in between, these eight artists boldly go where few women have gone … before, now or ever!

Korn made a lot of enemies this year when it was announced that they had made a dubstep album, even before anyone had heard it. Naysayers pointed to a number of fouls committed, including accusing Korn of making a dance album, of trend chasing and of the ever-vague but always-present "selling out."

This is a climbing legato run that moves across all six strings and up the fretboard, mostly through the A minor pentatonic scale (A C D E G). During the first beat, I add an extra "color tone," the flat-five "blue note" in the key of A, E♭, on the A string's sixth fret. From that point on, it's straight A minor pentatonic.

“By the way he carried himself, you really thought that Bon Scott was immortal,” says guitarist Angus Young of AC/DC’s late frontman. “He would drink like a fish, and when you saw him the next morning, he’d be no worse for wear. And you’d think to yourself, ‘How does this guy do this?’”